Thousands of workers at Britain’s biggest steel mill, Port Talbot, are facing redundancy under a taxpayer-funded Net Zero plan. The Telegraph has the story.
Tata Steel will be given £500m of taxpayer cash to fund its switch to Net Zero at its Port Talbot steelworks.
The Indian conglomerate is expected to invest £1.25bn, including the £500m of taxpayer money, in retooling the site to produce ‘greener’ steel, which ministers said will reduce the U.K.’s entire carbon emissions by around 1.5%.
However, the new processes will require fewer jobs and Tata will consult on a restructuring that could lead to 3,000 redundancies.
The Unite union described the plans as a “disgrace” and vowed to fight them. TUC general secretary Paul Nowak said it was a “devastating blow for workers at Port Talbot and the opposite of a just transition”.
Tata has been in talks with the Government for months about state aid to help switch the plant’s two coal-fired blast furnaces to electric arc versions that can run on zero-carbon electricity.
Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch said the Government “is backing our steel sector” and said the proposal would “save thousands of jobs in the long term”.
Ministers confirmed the deal had the potential to safeguard over 5,000 jobs across the U.K. Tata presently employs about 8,000 steel workers.
Ms. Badenoch said: “This is an historic package of support from the U.K. Government and will not only protect skilled jobs in Wales but also grow the U.K. economy, boost growth and help ensure a successful U.K. steel industry.”
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt added: “It is right that we are ready to step in to protect this world class manufacturing industry and to support a green growth hub in South Wales.”
Worth reading in full.
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These people are just shi tting on us left and right with money they print to add to the future debt of an imploding country benefitting foreign conglomerates with BS CO2 emissions targets. As if anything is justifiable if it’s done in the name of Net Zero.
We really just need to surround parliament and stop these fuckers getting out with a million man march. Scare the sheite out of them.
Its really past time.
Wasn’t Net Zero supposed to create jobs?
You’ve not been listening. The newly created jobs are mainly in China and India!
This story actually made it in the usual media. However, it looks like BS from Badenoch. In particular, the idea that Electric Arc Furnaces (EAF) “can run on zero-carbon electricity” is a case of BS. Are they going to switch to scrap steel being the main source rather than iron ore? Perhaps a deal with Hinkley Point C across the channel? The loss of jobs is not going to be limited to Port Talbot – after all, it is one of the major customers of an open cast colliery just up the road, near Merthyr.
Maybe one route to zero is to transfer more steel manufacture to China!
Given the Tata family’s other business interests, it’s a fair bet that they’ll be planning to increase their ironmaking activities back home in India…
I read the original article in the DT and it did make the point that the plant would need to only process recycled metal rather than ore
Actually scrap steel and iron (there’s a lot of it) has largely replaced virgin iron for some years now. It explains all the shouting over the years about steel plant redundancies, because fewer blast furnaces – therefore people to operate them – are required. Not transfer to China: that’s just union propaganda.
As for Net Zero electricity – that will be delivered by flocks of low flying pigs.
So CO2 is 0.04% of the atmosphere, and man-made CO2 is 3% of that, and the UK portion is 2% of that, and this will save 1.5% of that. And this is worth giving £500m away..? So if my maths is okay. 0.04 x 0.03 = 0.0012. The UK bit is 0.000024, and the saving is 0.00000036% of global CO2.
Brains in their arses, this lot.
… and in exchange for that, the taxpayer is subsidizing thousands of job losses in a region where jobs probably aren’t exactly pentiful.
The government is spending £500million to increase the number of people on benefits, so they can spend even more money supporting them.
You couldn’t make it up. Wait a minute these f**k wits just have.
Yep
Total CO2 in atmosphere = 432 ppm
Man made CO2 = 13 ppm
UK CO2 = 0.26 ppm
Port Talbot CO2 = 0.004 ppm
We are completely f…ing NUTS!!!
And that’s assuming CO2 causes global warming which it DOESN’T.
Here we go again –
Total CO2 in atmosphere = 432 ppm
There are just over 3,000 billion metric tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere (concentrations are irrelevant – they just show there is even more other gasses)
Man made CO2 = 13 ppm
Man made CO2 is about 33% of total in atmosphere. i.e. about 1,000 billion metric tonnes.
Here we go again – I agree. We can argue the figures all day long (heaven forbid) the fact of the matter is that not one person has ever proved that CO2 is responsible for global warming. And don’t insult my intelligence by quoting computer models.
The evidence that CO2 is responsible for some warming is overwhelming and does not involve models, most sceptical scientists accept it. The informed dispute is over how much warming and what will be the consequences.
Climate scientists have determined, and both sides agree, that the warming effect of each molecule of CO₂ decreases significantly (logarithmically) as its concentration increases. This is one reason why there was no runaway greenhouse warming when the concentration of CO₂ was approaching 20 times that of today. This inconvenient fact, important though it is, is kept very well hidden and is rarely mentioned, for it undermines the theory of future catastrophic climate change.
Diminishing returns apply
I agree with everything you write except it doesn’t undermine the theory that increases will lead to very damaging climate change. Logarithmic means approximately the same temperature change for the same percentage increase in GHGs That doesn’t mean change stops altogether.
“will lead to” ????———– But that is based on modelling is it not? Yet you said up the page that this isn’t about modelling. Speculative models full of assumptions are not science and they are not evidence of anything.
Or
In the discussion about greenhouse gases, organizations supporting man-made harmful warming, and their allies in the media focus solely on man-made gases as the main agents of greenhouse warming. They do not mention the most significant greenhouse gas of all—water vapor.
For example, both the EPA and National Geographic climate-change pages show no contribution from water vapor. The main driver of greenhouse warming — water vapor — is completely ignored.
Downplaying or disregarding water vapor, or assigning too large a magnitude to feedbacks such as the water-vapor feedback that is thought to amplify the direct warming from CO₂, serves to overemphasize Man’s contribution to greenhouse warming
Water vapour is included in basic climate science. It is a transient gas and acts to amplify the effect of long lasting gases such as CO2. I don’t know why the EPA and Nat Geo web pages don’t mention it but Google water vapour and climate change for many explanations.
But surely you know this already?
Positive feedbacks are assumptions. Most feedbacks in nature are negative.
But surely you know that already.
You made this rather strange argument before. The positive feedback follows from two widely accepted facts:
Water vapour is powerful greenhouse gas
The warmer the air the more water vapour it holds
No assumptions required
As to the relative frequency of negative and positive feedbacks in nature, I can’t see its relevance and I have no idea how you count feedbacks but, as I pointed out last time you raised this, there are many positive feedbacks in nature- any time where rate of growth is proportional to state of growth for example.
Yes so what? There have been times when CO2 was twenty times higher. You are so easily manipulated.—- CO2 = wealth, not climate. Which is why Edenhofer of the IPCC was decent enough to admit that “We redistribute the worlds wealth de facto by climate policy”
These eco socialist scum would have great difficulty explaining anything about climate or energy to five year olds, But as it happens it is and never was about science. PS your calculations are just fine
“Net Zero Jobs” doesn’t mean jobs created through Net Zero policies; it simply means no jobs.
Oh, it does mean jobs. But people who have worked in a steel making plant for years are probably less-than-ideally-suited to retrain as EDI consultants.
More dissembling from the various interested parties, as they sell the industry down the river.
Installing Electric Arc facilities is fine for melting scrap steel or billet imported from abroad, but doesn’t perform the same function as the Blast Furnaces, which make Iron from its ore. Closing the Blast Furnaces and stopping the Ironmaking process leaves the Port Talbot plant at the mercy of its competitors for feedstock supplies.
Ironically, Port Talbot has been operating on a single blast furnace for a number of years, and it was always custom and practice to have a standby furnace refurbished and ready to fire up if required. (IIRC, the Port Talbot site actually has 4 Blast Furnaces.)
There were certainly more than the two one can see now. Remember that a few years ago there was also a steelworks at Llanwern, east of Newport, that had three blast furnaces and all the other furnaces and production plant (one of my late Uncles worked there). When it was operating in the 1980s, it used iron ore imported by sea to Margam dock, near Port Talbot. Then the iron ore was hauled to Llanwern by train – heavy ones, around 2700 tonnes each. For a while, they used 3 class 37 locos, later on a couple of more modern ones. They were generally worked under special regulations, that they should not be stopped anywhere between Margam and Llanwern. They were too long to fit in some places to let anything else pass.
It’s OK, we’ll still be able to buy steel from China.
More evidence that this is simply deliberate societal and economic hara-kiri. It takes 150 tonnes of coal to build a solitary wind turbine so the idea that we can run a high capacity steel works on Unicorn farts from windmills is horseshit and they know it is.
Well, perhaps they’re planning to build something else that they aren’t talking about. E.g. a Severn Barrage, or the baby lagoons around Cardiff or Swansea to generate power that way.
Non industrial Western Europe. All heavy industry ie planes & boats & road vehicles etc etc transferred to China & India. All garden food supplied by Africa. All meat supplied by USA & South America.
Western Europe only used as a bureaucratic region to monitor & control world supply chain.
All non workers paid to stay at home on a dole payment basis. The mega masters flying & traveling as normal. Slaves are we to become. Maybe the workers allowed a holiday at their command, as an incentive to work harder. By 2050 this will become. Welcome to a corporate world control. Welcome to a police state to control dissent. Stand up Spartacus!!!!
Will India and China be replacing all their coal fired steel works with electric furnaces? Thought not. Below is a graphic showing global steel production and China’s strategy of producing vast amounts of cheep steel to wipe out western steel production is evident.
All our highly ‘educated’ ‘leaders’ must know that pumping hard earned public money into the net-zero money pit, especially one that benefits another nation, is a form of delusional self harm?
56.5% Chinese steel – a Chinese majority. Thanks for the graph.
Its not about climate change. That is just a red herring.
“Its about world change”
If you discuss climate change then you aren’t talking about the real reasons.
All politicians within the UN world are all crooked with their futures ascertain as long as they toe the line. But go and vote for “any” of them & nothing will change.
Its up to everyone to displace them all. One way or another.
Violence is not the answer as they will just declare martial law, & that is the gift they want.
Where is this green electricity come from? The UK is presently having an energy crisis. I haven’t heard that there is loads of green energy?
I believe we will get emergency electricity this winter from France in exchange for taking their migrants.
sounds about right
The west has used up more than its fair share of the fossil fuels in the ground in becoming prosperous and must STOP doing that according to the UN and it’s eco socialist Sustainable Development politics. This is basically what NET ZERO is. An exercise in taking away the fuels that brought prosperity to the west and to get away with that you need a plausible excuse. That plausible excuse is “climate change”. —–But it is only “plausible” if you only watch the mainstream news at 6 pm. The plausibility vanishes into thin air once you open your eyes and start to investigate for yourself. What you find then is that climate change is a smidgeon of the truth elevated into a planetary emergency that no science actually supports, and for which no evidence exists. In other words this is a SCAM. It is a scam that all politicians of our major parties are fully onboard with as they all waved Net Zero through Parliament with no questions asked. ——-Think about it for one second. Why did no politician ask “How much is this going to cost”? or “What effect will this have on global climate”? ————-They didn’t ask because it is and never was about the climate and basically they don’t care about you. They only care about getting a little gold star on their lapel from the UN and WEF.————-Soon they will jail you if you don’t get a smart meter or rip out your gas central heating. Globalist tyranny one step at a time.
This is just the start of the job losses the Net Zero lunacy will cause.
Tata family owners of over 100 companies personal net worth 291 billion dollars, and we are giving them money! Its the equivalent of a beggar on the streets of India turning his pockets out and handing over the cash to a Rajah
The fact that the plant will no longer process iron ore, just reprocessing scrap, is a sad day for this industry, all the knowledge of this industry will go the way of others, you cannot get everything from a book. What of the docks at Port Talbot, all the UK supply industry that support this facility, the local shop, families, etc. For what exactly? to have the government target figures look good and import everything from other countries that are increasing their carbon emissions. Pathetic, to say the least.
Hunt’s policies seem to support China not us.
Ayn Rand will chortle in her grave.
Does everyone else remember when Al Gore was trying to scare us with apocalyptic tales of what would happen if we breached 400ppm CO2?
I do and am celebrating with a late summer beer in the garden after an unusually miserable season.